1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to techniques for configuring a computer system. More specifically, the present invention relates to a method and apparatus for selectively switching ports from an integrated circuit (IC) device to card slots.
2. Related Art
Some computing platforms which include peripheral component interface express (PCI-E) expansion slots have the option (per slot) of supporting ×1, ×2, ×4, ×8 or ×16 wide interfaces, if a full-sized connector is used. Although a PCI-E slot is very flexible, it is not cost-effective to support ×16 ports on all card slots because the required pin count on a corresponding chipset to support this number of pins is excessive. Therefore, a subset of the number of possible pins on the IC chip (or chips) needs to be selected. For example, card slot configurations can include one ×16 port or two ×8 ports, or one ×8 port and two ×4 ports. This allows a number of different products to be built around one chipset. Any card slot port width can, in theory, be supported. However, the wire routes on the PC board fix the target application.
Previous techniques for solving this problem do not allow the end-user to configure the allocation of PCI-E slots. The options are limited by wire routes on the PC board and available pin-out of the integrated circuit chip. Note that each card slot pin is coupled to a corresponding IC pin.
Hence, what is needed is a method and an apparatus for switching IC ports to card slots without the problems described above.